heavy-duty hydraulic cylinders are specified for control functions on a coil slitting line built by special purpose machine manufacturers in Germany and the UK for a US company.

Parker Hannifin MMB heavy-duty hydraulic cylinders are specified for control functions on a coil slitting line built by special purpose machine manufacturers, Heinrich Georg Company in Germany and the UK, for a Toyota Tsusho America Inc (TAI) joint venture company, Millenium Steel Service, in Princeton, Indiana. This is the second line for a TAI company: the first line was delivered and commissioned in 1998 at the TAI steel coil slitting centre in Georgetown, Kentucky, and has a monthly production capacity of 15,000 tons. TAI is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Toyota Tsusho Corporation, a Toyota Group company.

TAI provides numerous products and services to a wide range of customers, including automotive manufacturers such as the various Toyota Motor companies and their suppliers in the United States, Canada and Mexico.

The Heinrich Georg slitting lines divide master coils of steel into narrower widths and are used primarily as 'inspection lines' for automotive grade materials.

The line is used to perform surface inspections, a particularly critical function for 'exposed applications' such as bonnets, bumpers, doors, etc.

Much of the steel processed on the lines is shipped to the Toyota Motor Manufacturing plants in the United States, eg, Kentucky which produces the Camry (midsize saloon), Avalon (large saloon) and Sienna (minivan), Indiana which produces the Tundra (large truck) and Sequoia (large Sport Utility Vehicle), Los Angeles which produces chassis for the Tacoma (small truck), and Freemont, California, which produces the Corolla (small saloon).

Heinrich Georg has long been recognised as a premier OEM manufacturer of machines for the world's steel industries, which feature only the best engineered components and systems available.

The company's design team has worked very closely with the Japanese and American engineers at TAI to get optimum tooling change times on every machine in the line.

The coil slitting line is able to handle differing types of material, such as steel and cold rolled, hot rolled, pickled and coated alloys, with a strip thickness from 0.7mm to 3.2mm, at production speeds up to 300 metres per minute.

Heinrich Georg supplied a series of machines which allow master coils of steel to be divided down into narrower width coils.

The master coils, each weighing up to 25 tonnes, can be divided into a maximum of 32 smaller coils of differing widths and weights.

The line comprises several machines for decoiling, cropping shear, slitting, tensioning and recoiling, and also has an automatic tool change machine and a scrap removal machine which takes scrap from both sides of the coil.

Each machine in the process has up to five hydraulic functions, each function being controlled by two Parker MMB hydraulic cylinders.

Parker's MMB 160 bar heavy-duty 'mill' cylinders are designed for use in arduous applications such as steel mills where a rugged durable cylinder with a clean external design is required, making them a natural choice for Heinrich Georg's slitting and packaging line.

The cylinders control the shearing actions on the cropping shear, and, on the automatic tool change machine, they control gate open and close, forward and reverse, pusher plate up and down and forward and back movements.

On the scrap removal system, the MMB cylinders control the drive in and out, crusher roll up and down, and injection in and out movements.